A Few Facts about Qumran and its Scrolls

A Few Facts about Qumran and its Scrolls 2026-08-09T20:57:17-04:00 Ben Witherington If there is one aspect of Biblical studies that may have been over-reported and over-studied since about 1947 are the Qumran scrolls, more popularly called the Dead Sea Scrolls (though they did not emerge floating in the Dead Sea, as I have done more than once) and the Qumran community that produced these scrolls. A few generally held conclusions have emerged over the years, for example, probably the Essenes are the ones who retreated to the Dead Sea having gotten fed up with the corruptions in the priesthood and general Jewish leadership, including the Hellenization of the leaders in the Hasmonean period, and set up a base came at the edge of the Dead Sea, awaiting an eschatological climax to human history pitting the sons of light vss. the sons of darkness. If this was a movie you could have called it ‘Apocalypse Then’. The community seems to have been initially founded by ‘The Teacher of Righteousness’ well before the time of John the Baptizer or Jesus, and the community has nothing directly to do with either the Jesus movement or early Christianity, expect that it lasted into the NT era, when Ti...